STOCKS SLIDE: Here's what you need to know

Stocks finished lower on Wall Street for the second day in a row
bringing the major averages into the red for the month of May.

First, the scoreboard:

Dow: 17,651.3, -99.7, (-0.6%)

S&P 500: 2,051.1, -12.3, (-0.6%)

Nasdaq: 4,725.6, -37.6, (-0.8%)

WTI crude oil: $43.90, +0.5%

US Economy

We're getting closer to Friday's big jobs report, and the first
reading on the labor market in April was disappointing.

ADP's
latest private payroll report showed the US economy added
just 156,000 jobs in April, the lowest number in three years. Of
course, this is the ADP's report which has been
much-maligned in some corners of the economics community and
so doesn't tell us a ton about how things are looking ahead of
Friday's jobs report. So there's that.

In the
services sector, Markit Economics' latest services PMI
hit 52.8, up from the flash reading of 52.1 the prior month
and indicating faster expansion of activity in the sector. ISM's
similar non-manufacturing PMI rose to 55.7, up from 54.8 and also
indicating a faster pace of expansion in activity in the
sector.

Factory orders
rose 1.1% in March, more than the 0.6% increase that was
forecast by economists and better than the 1.9% decline seen the
previous month.

The most notable piece of economic commentary out Wednesday was
Deutsche
Bank's look at the US savings rate, which remains higher than
the firm expects and sets up the economy for a period of slower
growth. About two-thirds of GDP is consumer spending, and so an
increase in saving implies a decrease in spending, and
particularly in the wake of the decline in oil prices this
savings rate increase has puzzled economists.

We got some forceful reader pushback on this idea, however, with
folks arguing that the savings rate is not indicative of overall
savings increasing but merely marginal savings from consumers who
have already spent their savings.

Tesla

Electric carmaker Tesla is out
with earnings after the bell but it was a newsy day for the
company during normal business hours.

Just after noon, Bloomberg's Tom Randall
reported that two executives responsible for building the
company's cars are leaving the automaker.

Greg Reichow, the company's VP of production, and Josh Ensign, VP
of manufacturing, are
leaving the firm.

Randall also noted that five Tesla VPs have departed this year,
and this wave of departures can't help but raise questions about
the company's production processes and potential success.

Speaking at the Sohn Conference on Wednesday, hedge fund manager
Jim Chanos said that he's short shares of Tesla as well as
SolarCity, the solar panel company also controlled by the Tesla
CEO Elon Musk. Tesla shares lost about 4% on Wednesday; Solar
City finished down about 11%.

Sohn Conference

The hedge fund industry's biggest event of the year, the
Sohn Investment Conference, took place Wednesday and, of
course, there were big calls to be had all over the place.

In addition to Chanos' short bets on Tesla and SolarCity, one of
the biggest calls out of the event was Stanley Druckenmiller
telling investors he wants to be completely out of the stock
market. "The bull market is exhausting itself,"
Druckenmiller said Wednesday.

Druckenmiller added that this feels, to him, like the period
right before the financial crisis. Also: buy gold.

Palihapitiya' bull case, like most of those on Amazon these
days, is built on the back of the company's strong Amazon Web
Services business, which he basically called a tax on the
internet and innovation. Everyone needs servers and web hosting,
and AWS is cornering this market.

Bill Gross

But what really caught our eye, aside from Gross'
displeasure with central bank policy and young people, was his
call that we're going to see universal basic income happen and
the central banks will finance this with helicopter drops of
money.

Universal basic income — or basically just giving money
away to people no strings attached — has gotten more attention of
late, particularly out of Silicon Valley.

Joe Weisenthal had
some thoughts on why tech-types like the idea of basic
income, and I think this idea is mostly right.

If you're a tech-first kind of person who is sure you're
going to build automated technologies that will make work as we
defined it — something you do to get paid so you can live and buy
stuff — almost obsolete, Joe thinks universal basic income
perhaps provides a way to be left alone to do your cool work and
keep the non-working classes placated.

This is would be a pretty paternalistic
and self-centered point of view for the tech community to hold. I
agree that they broadly do.

And this gets at why I'm generally skeptical of
universal basic income. I'd love to get money and not have to
work. We all would. But thinking that we're going
to have to all get money not to work because
technological progress is just so vast that we're all out of work
has a logical conceit that we're at the end of some moment
that ends our modern, post-industrial working society. Which is a
big claim.